Hi - I have a Dell Dimension 9100, circa 2005, that I'd like to give away or sell, but first I wanted to wipe the disk. In order to do so, I used DBAN, which I was told would not touch the HPA (Host Protected Area). DBAN ran successfully, but now I can't get into the Dell System restore partition in order to re-install the OS. (using Control-F11 at boot, which did work *before* the DBAN). I've found a tool called DRSFIX (detail here: https://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/) that can be used to possibly fix this issue. However, in order to use DSRFIX, I need to boot into DOS, hence I'm trying to get a FreeDOS bootable USB working. I don't have another PC handy, but I formatted a USB key to FAT with MBR using OSX, and installed the 1.2 version of FreeDOS to this USB drive using this command: > sudo dd if=~/Downloads/FD12LITE/FD12LITE.img of=/dev/disk2 I was then able to boot into FreeDOS on my Dell, by selecting the "Boot from USB" option from the Dell boot menu. However, after booting, it comes up with the error:Bad or missing Command Interpreter: command.com /P /E:256 Enter the full shell command line: It gives a few other warnings about partitions when booting up, that I can copy down when I get back to the computer later... One thing to note is that in the BIOS, I have disabled regular floppy disks, I've only set it to accept USB floppy (whatever that means). I saw in some other messages that this "missing Command Interpreter" error may have something to do with floppy disks, so I'm wondering if I have to attach a floppy disk or tweak bios settings or something here? I'm also wondering whether DBAN having blown away the c: drive could be causing the issues with FreeDOS not wanting to fully boot. Does anyone have any hints of next steps I can try to debug this? Thanks!karlkarl_tra...@yahoo.com
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